


Worry

by zorilleerrant



Category: Static Shock
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-30
Updated: 2017-05-30
Packaged: 2018-11-07 00:10:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11047221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zorilleerrant/pseuds/zorilleerrant
Summary: Written for Static Shock Appreciation Week 2017, for a prompt about a favorite character. Virgil's dad worrying about Static, and showing why he's one of the best dads from TV.





	Worry

Robert Hawkins knew how to deal with teenagers. He had two of his own, after all – well, one, and one barely out of those years – and he had all the teenagers in the center to look out for. People said teenagers were the difficult ones, but they weren’t really. You just had to know how to handle them.

There were problems, of course, there were for any age. The littlest children needed a lot of looking after, and were prone to getting hurt even when everything was childproofed. Older children were just learning how to do homework, and they needed guidance and some way to vent frustration. Teenagers were practicing for adulthood, so they made more and more creative mistakes, and, sometimes, they got themselves into trouble.

It wasn’t more difficult, though. It was just a different set of issues, and all the kids really needed was some support – someone to talk to, something to do, maybe some guidance here and there, in the form of a lecture, which he wasn’t averse to.

Honestly, he had more of a problem with his own kids, not that they caused much trouble for him. Sharon and Virgil were good kids, always tried to help him out, and maybe that was the problem. At the Center, he wasn’t supposed to play favorites, and he tried very hard not to, and, at the same time, the kids who acted out were clearly the ones most in need of help. Sometimes he forgot that he was allowed to play favorites when it came to his own kids, though. They never seemed to mind, but he worried.

He worried about Sharon and Virgil, he worried about Richie, who had spent so much time over his house he wondered if he’d accidentally adopted the boy, he worried about the kids’ other friends, and he worried about all the kids at the Center, so worry wasn’t new to him. What was new to him was worrying about a boy whose name he didn’t even know.

It was alright to call him Static; that was what the news always called him, and if you used it, people knew who you were talking about. It was strange not having a real name, though. Oh, he knew why well enough, or could guess – there was the usual worry of protecting a superhero’s loved ones, and avoiding the police, since vigilantism was technically a crime, and perhaps even protecting a different reputation.

Still, he knew the kinds of kids it was all too easy to find in the city, and he worried. He worried that Static was involved with the gangs, and couldn’t be caught by the other members. He worried that Static was already wanted, for a crime that he didn’t commit, or one that shouldn’t be called a crime at all, and he worried the boy was a witness to something he was too scared to come forward about.

He worried that Static wasn’t protecting his family, but protecting himself from his family instead. He worried that Static had no family. He worried that Static hid his face because he couldn’t look himself in the mirror, couldn’t see himself as whole, or couldn’t recognize himself, or couldn’t believe he deserved anything unless he was in costume fighting crime.

The boy was in high school, probably, maybe a young adult, still far too young to take on his shoulders the burden of the whole city’s crime problem. He wished he could help. He didn’t have any magnetic powers, but he had friends and he had organizational skills, and maybe, given enough time, they could get other people on the job, adults emotionally equipped to handle it, who had the training and the resources they needed to do it.

For now, though, there was only Static.

He didn’t have any problem with Static, per se. In fact, he rather liked the energetic young superhero. Static clearly cared about the people, and wanted to help, wanted to protect people from violence and danger, and wanted them to feel safe around him. He was polite and friendly, always said hello, thanked people, and rarely disappeared without saying goodbye. He was everywhere, seemingly, and whenever he was needed. And, of course, it didn’t hurt the kids any to have a young black man to look up to, especially in a vocation that was usually so overwhelmingly white.

That had to take a toll on a boy, though. Not just the attention, the scrutiny, knowing his mistakes would be magnified a dozen times over the next hero’s. And not just the pressure to be everywhere at once, to never miss a crime in progress; he seemed to focus mostly on the crimes involving metahumans, which was just as well. At least he knew he couldn’t do everything.

There was such a time commitment, though, even picking and choosing his battles, that Rob had to worry. High school was a time commitment, too, more of one if the child was in any advanced classes, or playing sports, or a member of the band or robotics club or debate team or whatever other extracurriculars he liked. And that was leaving aside a social life, and he knew how important that was to a teenager’s happiness and interpersonal development.

He thought about Virgil, and how busy he was, even without being a superhero on top of it. So much work assigned for school, not to mention the extra chemistry or engineering or he’d learned not to ask what projects Richie and Virgil studied on their own time. And he was working on the school paper sometimes, or academic clubs, and then he had to juggle all his time with friends and the tutoring he took quite seriously. It didn’t even leave him time for a part-time job, although he still volunteered at the Center pretty regularly.

Rob didn’t remember having that much to do when he was a teenager, but he was willing to admit it had been a long time, and anyway, it was common knowledge that the workload had gotten heavier, the expectations for extracurriculars higher, the time demands more. Not to mention there were just so many more interesting things to do these days, and that caught even Robert off guard from time to time.

So Static was someone he worried about just a little more than usual, but if he played favorites with a superhero, no one seemed to notice.

All Robert could do was be there, and let Static know there was an open door with an ear always willing to listen. There was always someplace to go if he needed it, help, advice, food to eat if nothing else. All he could do was tell the superhero that he was concerned, and that he wanted to help, and hope neither his concern nor his help was needed.

Because what he knew about fighting battles like this one, fights with no clear-cut sides, was that sooner or later, you had to start making tough calls. Tougher than you wanted to. Too tough to ask someone no older than his son to make. And if they went wrong – and they never went perfectly right – then they weighed on you, and it was hard to stay a kid much longer.

Static was one of the kids Robert Hawkins worried about most.


End file.
